In a survey for Elron, developers of the monitoring software package Message Inspector, more than half of the 805 workers questioned said they had received obscene, sexist or otherwise offensive e-mails in the past year. Employers are responding with a rapid expansion of Internet and e-mail monitoring in the workplace. Rather than giving the office pest who views sex sites and sends off colour e-mails a sharp rebuke to put them in their place, workers are increasingly launching actions against their employers for failure to provide a 'non-threatening' work environment. Chevron Oil, for example, had to pay $2.2million compensation to female employees claiming sexual harassment after the widespread circulation of an email entitled "20 reasons why a beer is better than a woman". Initiating such actions encourages employers to police relations among their workers. Increasingly, people are more likely to regard their colleagues as a problem rather than an ally, and are looking to their employers for protection.

According to an American Management Association survey released in 1999, 45% of major U.S. firms record and review employee communications and activities, including phone calls, e-mail, and computer files. It is estimated that by 2001, 80 % of large companies in the US will be spending a total of $200 million on filtering software. Rapid technological developments, far from empowering staff, have made employer monitoring considerably easier. Elron's Message Inspector software prevents 'objectionable' material being sent under a company name, and diverts that material to management for investigation. Silent Watch from Adavi can monitor hundreds of computers providing alarms to the system administrator's viewer on 'objectionable' Web sites or 'inappropriate' text content based on a dictionary defined by the administrator.

The Oxford English Dictionary provided a list of 40,000 dirty words for Elron deemed to be obscene, sexist, racist or otherwise offensive. Even Elron's European sales director, Pat Dunne, was taken aback by the scope of the list. He said: "When I first saw the list, I was amazed. There were mild words like dimwit but some of the severe entries, I couldn't even guess what they referred to. The list includes slang from every English-speaking country."